PHORMIO. 330

Soph. “No; certainly not.”

Chr. “What about the other — the cousin, then?”

Soph. “Why, it’s the same person. ‘That is your
daughter Phanium.”

Chr. “Heaven be thanked! That’s exactly what
I wanted, and it has all come to pass without my '
doing anything.”

Demipho had by this time paid the money agreed
upon to Phormio. The arrangement only half pleased
him. ‘We encourage these fellows to be scoundrels
by our easiness,” he said. Still, he could only hope,
the best. The next thing he had to do was to
persuade Chremes’s wife Nausistrata to undertake
the unpleasant task of breaking the thing to Anti-
pho’s young wife. She had already helped him
more than once, and this would be another act of
kindness.

“You are very welcome,” replied Nausistrata; ‘I
only wish I could have done more, but my husband
is a very poor man of business. He does not manage
things as my father did. He used to get nearly five
hundred pounds out of the property, and that when
prices were much lower than they are now.”

“ Five hundred pounds!” said Demipho.

“Yes,” said Nausistrata, “I only wish that I had
been born a man. I would show them.”

As she spoke she saw Chremes, who was, of
course, greatly excited by the identification of hfs
missing daughter with the orphan girl whom Antipho
had married.